books.google.com - Sabrina Castro, an attractive woman with a strong New England heritage, is married to a wealthy, older California physician who no longer fulfills her dreams. An almost accidental misstep leads her down the slow descent of moral disintegration, until there is no place for her to go but up and out. How...http://books.google.com/books/about/A_shooting_star.html?id=53sGAQAAIAAJ&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareA shooting star

A shooting star

Sabrina Castro, an attractive woman with a strong New England heritage, is married to a wealthy, older California physician who no longer fulfills her dreams. An almost accidental misstep leads her down the slow descent of moral disintegration, until there is no place for her to go but up and out. How Sabrina comes to terms with her life is the theme of this absorbing personal drama, played out against the background of an old Peninsula estate where her mother lives among her servants, her memories of Boston, and her treasured family archives. A Shooting Star displays the storytelling powers that Wallace Stagner's fans have enjoyed for more than half a century.

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Review: A Shooting Star

User Review - Ginger - Goodreads

"There was a good deal to her, if only she could ever quit being the leading lady in her own melodrama.". This quote sums up the story.... but as usual Stegner writes with such elegance that the words ...Read full review

Review: A Shooting Star

User Review - Stephen - Goodreads

Madame Bovary goes west, and with a different ancestry than Emma. I found this engrossing, though in it the theme of the land ethic so important to Stegner is only a small backstory. This is very much ...Read full review

About the author (1961)

In 1972, Stegner won a Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971), a novel about a wheelchair-bound man's re-creation of his New England grandmother's experience in a late nineteenth-century frontier town. As a result, Stegner is undergoing something of a revival. His work enjoys a new appreciation for its traditional narrative forms, its use of rich detail, and the unpretentious way it treats general social and psychological issues. For readers tired or confused by postmodernist fiction, Stegner offers relief. Stegner may also be the beneficiary of a quickening of interest in the latest literary westward expansion that includes such diverse writers as Jane Smiley and Larry McMurtry. Stegner's novels and stories are profoundly influenced by the American West where he grew up, and he wants to construct the history of a place where people went, often trying to escape the past. Moving between Eastern "cultivation" and Western "nature," Stegner's novels trace various stages in the Westward movement of the American experience. Against this broad cultural landscape, showing the modern betrayal of the past, Stegner details individual human behavior through a range of fully conceived and finely drawn characters. He is a master at tracing the changes over time in marriages and friendships, as well as at depicting the poignant tensions between a mind that remains strong in a body that is succumbing to illness.